GROWING UP UNDER SURVEILLANCE

ITEM: California officials are outfitting preschoolers in Contra Costa County with RFID tracking devices.

When at the school, students will wear a jersey that has a small radio frequency tag. The tag will send signals to sensors that help track children's whereabouts, attendance and even whether they've eaten or not.

School officials say it will free up teachers and administrators who previously had to note on paper files when a child was absent or had eaten.

The ACLU is not amused.

I’ve never been one to buy into the paranoid hysteria over RFID chips being the Mark of the Beast that allows Wal-mart to track yr panties everywhere they go (it's not and they don’t), but the ACLU does raise a couple of good points here – like privacy, and the security angle. RFID chips are hackable, so you can’t always be sure the kids are being tracked by the Right People.

Also, there’s something to be said for this quote from Scientific American:

"Tagging … kids becomes a form of indoctrination into an emerging surveillance society that young minds should be learning to question."
 

Which is becoming difficult thanks to schools in America that are implementing zero-tolerance policies that get you thrown out of school for playground tussles and carrying a Cub Scout fork-spoon-knife tool, according to Aaron Kupchik, who has just written a book on the topic:
 

 

We're teaching kids what it means to be a citizen in our country. And what I fear we're doing is teaching them that what it means to be an American is that you accept authority without question and that you have absolutely no rights to question punishment. It's very Big Brother-ish in a way. Kids are being taught that you should expect to be drug tested if you want to participate in an organization, that walking past a police officer every day and being constantly under the gaze of a security camera is normal. And my concern is that these children are going to grow up and be less critical and thoughtful of these sorts of mechanisms. And so the types of political discussions we have now, like for example, whether or not wiretapping is OK, these might not happen in 10 years.

The same could be said for tagging kids with RFID chips.

Be true to yr school or else,

This is dF